Gmail – How to Find Conversations with Nested Labels in Inbox

gmailgmail-labels

My inbox contains the following emails:

(a) John (0)     label:XY label:XY/Z
(b) Mary (0)     label:XY label:XY/Z
(c) Zack, me (5) label:XY label:XY/Z

where (0) indicates that I have not yet answered emails (a) and (b), while (5) indicates that 'Zack' and myself have already exchanged a bunch of emails.

When I type

label:XY-Z in:inbox

… in order to find all emails with sub-label Z, which is nested under label XY, Gmail finds only emails (a) and (b).

Why does Gmail fail at finding conversations with nested labels?

The problem only occurs for conversations (i.e. emails to which I have already answered), and does not occur when I search for the 'main' label XY instead:

label:XY in:inbox

My XY and Z labels are made only of uppercase letters.

Any help would be very much appreciated.

Best Answer

Here are a few things you can try, although I admit it's tough to recreate the scenario you describe.

  1. You mention that the problem seems to exist only for emails you have already answered. Are you sure that the in:Inbox search term isn't the problem? If you have responded and Archived the email thread, then it won't return when searching for in:Inbox
  2. You can try using the left-hand menu to see what Gmail uses as its search term, maybe it's different than what you're entering? In the left-hand menu, you should be able to navigate to the label you're searching for. Clicking on the label name (either the parent or the child label) will pull up all the emails AND throw the search term into the search box. You can try clicking on the label name in the left-side and then appending in:Inbox to that and see if the problem still exists.
  3. Last thing you can try is this: it looks like Gmail formats its nested label text as "XY/Z." Searching for that also produced the expected results when I tried in my own Gmail. Search for label:xy/z in:inbox and it seems like it pulled up what I was expecting. Maybe using the "/" instead of the "-" would work.

Good luck!

Related Topic